The other two seemed too big and complicated to answer in a quick email.

I don't remember that much about the controversy over Joel Hayward's thesis. I don't believe that his thesis work itself told us much about antisemitism in New Zealand, but the University's unwillingness to accept the criticisms levelled by the Jewish community, and the reactions of some other people were disappointing. At minimum I see that by Hayward's own account he was treating as credible some sources, such as the now infamous Leuchter report, that should immediately have warned his supervisors that he was in over his head. At that time David Irving was still a somewhat credible figure among historians, but Leuchter was not. I am not willing to draw inferences as to how or why the experienced academics who should have been guiding Hayward's work were able to let it reach fruition in the state that it did, but I find it surprising.

On the other hand, I remember the Kupka affair well, at least its beginnings. In the late 90s, I worked at the University of Waikato. I was regularly reading the soc.culture.german newsgroup on Usenet, the world wide web still being in its infancy, and posting occasionally. Out of the blue, I received an email from a Richard Neumann, asking me if I knew anything about a certain Hans J Kupka. Neumann told me Kupka was a frequent poster to various German language newsgroups. Kupka would argue about things like the propensity for asylum seekers to commit murder more frequently than native Germans, or how odd it was that people imprisoned in Germany for illegal neo-nazi activity weren't treated as political prisoners, or how Fred Leuchter (author of a bizarre "study" claiming that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz) had been vilified unfairly.

Kupka tended to avoid making explicit claims about the facticity of the Holocaust. Instead, he would express sympathy for other people who denied the Holocaust, or claim that the whole thing was greatly overplayed by Jews who wanted German compensation money. Many of his postings to Usenet comprised lengthy attempts to walk back the obvious inferences that other people drew from what he wrote. I got the distinct impression re-reading just now that he took pleasure in baiting people by making inflammatory but oblique statements and then claiming innocence.

(my translation) But the murders of the Hitler regime are different. There, the coins are loudly jingling. And now we slowly get close to the reason for the "uniqueness" of this crime: for the first time, there's something in it for the victims or the survivors. As long as the cow gives milk, one would be stupid to let it go. In other words: I posit for discussion whether it's not precisely Germany's willingness to pay, that leads to the first, second and probably even the third post-war generation being presented with the bill. And in order to do that successfully, naturally the picture of the "ugly Germans" needs to be spread in the media so that the guilt complex can't resolve itself.

(my translation) Prejudices always have a genuine component, according to the saying "where there's smoke there's fire." For antisemitism, spread all over the world, there is a real background, which does not lie in the Jews' well-known generosity, humility, friendliness, yieldingness and readiness to forgive.

Kupka favoured a very legalistic debating style and was not above citing his authority as a scholar of German to bolster a point about how his choice of words should be interpreted. Neumann got in touch because Kupka had mentioned his doctoral studies at Waikato, and Neumann wanted to find out if this claim was true. I hadn't met Kupka, but I made enquiries with one of my lecturers, Norman Franke, and Norman was horrified by what he read.

I don't want to rehash the whole thing. It was unpleasant and divisive. It created sad rifts in the local Jewish community as people disagreed about how far we should compromise with the university. Furthermore, while I helped set the affair in motion, I had already moved to Wellington when it reached its conclusion. I heard much at second and third hand and I don't want to pollute the record with half-recollections of what others told me.

I do want to single out Norman for showing considerable personal courage in pursuing the issue. You have to be brave to question your academic superiors and endanger the viability of your own department. Tiny university departments live and die on their ability to attract and retain postgraduate students, so this was potentially career suicide. Yet Norman did it anyway. Many other people played an important role afterwards but he immediately saw what was happening and forged ahead.

As I've been googling to refresh my memory, I see that Kupka has become something of a cause celebre for local neo-nazis. They put the blame on Jewish staff members at the University of Waikato, and name them. It amuses me to see old family friends like Dov Bing cast as villains. Norman Franke, who as far as I know is a godless Marxist of Protestant extraction, and perfectly Aryan in appearance, seems to have escaped both blame and credit.

During the time I studied at Waikato I believe I must have been taught by every lecturer in the German department. I should say that they were aware of my ethnic affiliations and I was always treated with exemplary courtesy. Indeed, Norman was not alone and another lecturer assisted him in translation work. I personally have no reason to suspect antisemitic animus in the way the department and in turn the University dealt with the scandal. I don't blame antisemitic motives -- I blame venality and pride, although other people in the community believe I am too charitable. Thus for me, the reluctance of the two universities to deal with Hayward and Kupka's work does not tell us much about antisemitism in NZ per se. What we saw there was a classic case of large institutions placing their own interests first, trying to damp down negative PR and save face. However, the reactions of other people to these stories as they played out in public did reveal a vein of sympathy for the views expressed by Hayward and Kupka which I would class as inherently antisemitic. And we can only speculate about the motivations of people who have not made their views public.

Recently, the University of Waikato has got into trouble again. Kerry Bolton has figured in New Zealand's far right scene for a long time, and he objected to the claims made about him in a thesis submitted to the University by Roel van Leeuwen. As far as I know, those claims were perfectly true, or at least plausible. The University acted swiftly to remove the thesis from its library to pacify Bolton, whose history of Holocaust denial and neo-nazi activism goes way back. The student newspaper ran an article that gives a great account of the Bolton business.

It is interesting to contrast the University's speedy reaction to a complaint from one person with their earlier reluctance to act until a large group of people applied concerted pressure. The charitable explanation for this change in behaviour is that the University has learned the wrong lessons from past experience. Other explanations are left as an exercise for the reader.

To digress further for a moment, Bolton almost succeeded in a complaint to the Broadcasting Standards Authority when Scott Hamilton, with perfect justification, called him a holocaust denier and neo-nazi on air. We live in a time where calling someone a racist, a bigot or a nazi is treated as a crime against manners that's somehow almost as bad as actually being a racist, a bigot or a nazi. Scott's account of the story is worth reading:

To what extent is New Zealand an antisemitic society now? I think we can say that it is nowhere near as bad as in countries with a longstanding institutional tradition of Jew-hating, such as Russia, or Austria, or even France. On the other hand, antisemitism exists here, and it may even be growing.

The thing about being a locally raised Jew in New Zealand is that unless you are Orthodox enough to dress distinctively, or unless you make a big thing of it soon after meeting people, you are effectively both rare and undercover. Therefore people say things in the happy belief that they are unlikely to be called on it. They are generally very defensive if you do call them on it. "It's just a figure of speech."

I personally am not observant, nor do I have that much to do with the Jewish community any more. I was raised in an atheistic environment and I remain unable to believe in the supernatural. However, I feel what you might call tribal loyalty. I probably do have a certain Jewish turn of thought (though Norman, mentioned above, accused me of being an Anglosaxon pragmatist when I expressed skepticism about Marx' theories of historical development). I feel wounded when I hear people use "Jew" as a synecdoche for a cheating money-grubber. I feel obliged to worry about whether my behaviour will affect people's perception of Jews in general. I feel annoyed when people who have no connection at all use Yiddish, wrongly. The ASB Goldstein ads troubled me as reinforcing stereotypes and prejudices, even if they didn't portray the hapless Goldstein in a particularly negative light.

Recently, I've started to become really unhappy with the language I see people using when the subject of Israel comes up. To the outside world Israel is simply a country with Jewish bloc and an Arab one. Of course in fact the population comprises a large range of communities, political views and factions (see for example the widely read paper Haaretz). I read a lot of things in local media that start out "The Jews are..." where plausibly, what is meant is "the current Israeli government is...", that in turn use language that is uncomfortably evocative. The local left is obsessed with Israel to a degree that seems weird given the level of human rights abuses we see in other countries. I feel that if antisemitism is not manifest, it is lurking. A friend of mine told me recently that a recurring problem in organising groups in support of Palestinians was keeping the Nazi sympathisers out. To her credit, she saw this as a problem that needed dealing with.

You can see a less ambiguous demonstration of antisemitic feeling from some New Zealanders in the recent debate over kosher slaughter. If you look at the comments sections of newspaper articles, a sizeable minority tell Jews to go back where they came from if we can't comply with the majority's way of life. But perhaps that's just general mainstream xenophobia about cultural differences and not really about Jews. A prominent member of SAFE happens to be a friend of mine, and in the middle of their campaign to ban kosher slaughter he asked me, quite innocently, why the Jewish community was so upset. (One of the things about belonging to a minority is that you become an informal spokesperson to members of the majority, no matter what your personal views). He found it hurtful that they had been accused of racism; SAFE had simply seen it as a high-profile issue where they could finally get some traction on animal welfare. I explained about the Nazi ban on kosher slaughter and the double standard inherent in singling out a religious community for something any farmer or hunter can do. He was abashed.

Well, finally we get to phenomena like the vandalism of our graveyards. The threats that mean that synagogues and community centres need far more security than churches. The strong probability of hate mail when I blog about explicitly Jewish topics. I don't think there are many people who hate Jews enough to actually take positive action in New Zealand, but they exist and in enough numbers to cause Jews to have to change their behaviour. Typical Pakeha New Zealanders don't worry about publishing their contact details after writing about being a typical Pakeha New Zealander. But I do. Not for myself, you understand, but in case it's not me who answers the door.

In summary, not to a large extent, but to a measurable extent that has consequences for the Jews who live here.